Review Roundup: THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS Opens At The Public Theater

The world premiere of the new musical The Seat Of Our Pants opens tonight at The Public Theater, featuring a cast led by Ruthie Ann Miles, Micaela Diamond, Amina Faye, Damon Daunno, Shuler Hensley, and Andy Grotelueschen. The production has been extended through Sunday, December 7. Read the reviews!

The Public’s Emerging Writers Group alumnus and Obie Award–winning playwright, songwriter, and singer Ethan Lipton brings his irreverently funny musical to The Public for its first staging.

A musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, the production follows the Antrobus family, alive for 5,000 years and still facing the same anxieties and uncertainty as everyone else. Mired in the contradictions of simply being human, the Antrobuses navigate catastrophe after catastrophe in their ongoing effort to begin again.

The production is choreographed by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt, and directed by two-time Tony Award nominee Leigh Silverman, 

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: It’s been over three years since Lincoln Center’s ambitious and winning revival of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of apocalypse-meets-absurdity The Skin of Our Teeth, which originally premiered on Broadway—mid-World War II—in 1942. Now the Public Theater is mounting Ethan Lipton’s knockout-excellent original musical adaptation, The Seat of Our Pants. The show, just shy of three hours long (booking to Dec. 7), is crisply directed (by Leigh Silverman), exquisitely performed by a starry, award-garlanded cast, and one of New York’s musical highlights of the year, on or off-Broadway.

Allison Considine, New York Theatre Guide: The cast is an embarrassment of riches, with Shuler Hensley and Ruthie Ann Miles as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, Damon Daunno and Amina Faye as their children, and Micaela Diamond as Sabina, the family maid. Not to mention a whole ensemble of incredible vocalists who also playfully portray animals; the woolly mammoth and dinosaur are especially great.

Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: Last weekend I witnessed the premiere of The Seat of Our Pants at The Public Theater, and found the show to be pretty much a dud both as a musical and a production, only sporadically brightened by lively performances. This bums me out so much that it’s difficult to detail much about the misguided production that opened on Thursday, so let’s be brief before salty tears wreck my keyboard.

Average Rating: 70.0%